Adventures with lightweight and minimalist software for Linux

Bonus: A dozen more remainders

It’s that time again: I have another list of titles that were either inaccessible to me by virtue of technical shortcomings on my part, or mental shortcomings on my part. As always, I encourage you to try these on your own, because there’s always the chance something didn’t work for me — or just didn’t enthuse me — and it might do quite the opposite for you.

Here we go. ..

blackwar: I got a note a month or so ago about blackwar and did my best to try it out, but every run gave me errors that I couldn’t reconcile. blackwar looks like the gameplay mechanics for an multidimensional strategy game, but what little I saw didn’t appear to be complete either.

disperse: disperse replaces strings of zeroes in a file with null characters; I believe the goal here is to prepare a file for compression, and hopefully save space. I honestly couldn’t see a use case for me personally, so I set it aside. If you’re into compression algorithms, it might be interesting to you.

jered: This is on my list as a text editor, but I couldn’t get it to compile without “dereferencing pointer” errors. Unfortunately I lack the skill to solve errors like that. If you know of a way to get jered working, it might be worth a little time to straighten it out. Not in AUR or Debian that I could see.

mpdtoys: I was going to buzz through mpdtoys this week, but I changed my mind because none of them sound like game-changers to me. There’s a short list of “toys” on the web site so you can see if it is interesting to you; I’m not an mpd user to start with, so the idea of moving a song between daemons on different machines is just a fanciful giggle to me. Check it out if you use mpd though. Updated recently, I think.

p2pvc: Thanks to everyone who sent a note about p2pvc, the textmode video chat for terminals. I tinkered with it for a short time last week, just on the one machine I have with a webcam, but didn’t get much in the way of results. That might have been because I have just one machine with a webcam, so it wasn’t going very far.🙄

playmidi: I had playmidi on my list from a long time ago. It’s apparently only in Debian, although it might be hiding in Arch/AUR somewhere. I was briefly interested to see what it could do, then realized some of my Googling research were leading me back to this very site, where imgx64 said it would need an external synthesizer to work. I haven’t got one of those.

slst: vanheusden.com has a lot of interesting tools for administrators or system watchdogs, like both genstats and logintop10. I’m going to pass on slst though, since it’s a self-described syslog statistics generator. I’m not sure how it would react to working with syslog and the new systemd stuff in Arch. Actually, I’m not sure how syslog would react to working with the new systemd stuff in Arch. Debian users might have better luck, for a short while.

smartcurrencyconvert.py: This was on my list as a currency converter that uses live statistics to generate up-to-the-minute exchange values. I stepped over it mostly because it appeared to require an account on the host site, and I’m not keen on opening accounts just to try software.

src2pkg: A software packaging subsystem, kind of like toast. I don’t see this in either Debian or Arch, which probably makes sense since both of those systems have their own tried-and-true packaging tools. I tinkered with it briefly but lost interest when it became challenging to arrange properly.

unquote: I am not embarrassed to say it: unquote was so abstract to me that I never really figured out what I was supposed to be doing with it. The description suggests it is a way to allow specific characters to be passed on the command line, without quotes. If that’s correct, I’m even more confused since I never got it to work that way. Check and see if it makes sense to you.

vapors: a/k/a Vapors of Insanity, this is a roguelike that apparently is heavy on story and plot. (That’s what they all say.🙄 Then you spend hours punching the arrow keys and smacking around goblins, wading through fetch quests. …) This segfaulted at every opportunity, so I never saw it in action.😦

woody: A “tree editor” that dates back a decade or so. This needs a “python slang” library to work, and I can’t seem to find anything in Arch or Debian that fits that description. …😕

That’s good for now. I actually had one more title I was going to add as a baker’s dozen because I couldn’t get to the source code. But the home page appears to be working, so I’ll give it a second chance at fame.🙄 Ha, who am I kidding?

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6 thoughts on “Bonus: A dozen more remainders”

Used unquote. Crazy. I’d find a use case if I had to feed args in cyrillic or japanese into a command. You’d pass strings to xxd -p and then in unquote. But as far as I used it I’d prefer to write an ad-hoc C program😀